My family didn’t believe it, but we read it anyway. And it is true. I understand everything Jesus said. EVERYTHING! Even know where he left out information on purpose because his generation wasn’t ready for the truth.

I understand souls, God, how Satan’s Kingdom is divided, and how God and Satan fight
in the world today. Except the actual truth is different from what anyone expects.

It is a small book, as predicted, but every page is packed with new ideas. The words draw
pictures, making the understanding easy. Even how creation started. And what the Holy
Ghost is made out of.

It was written in the Bible that it would come in the hands of an angel to the world from God.
I read it, and I don’t believe any human mind could have that much new information by itself.
A thousand geniuses couldn’t have written that book.

The fact that it is here today amazes me. We must be in end times for it to exist.
I need an expert on Revaluations to commit on the book.

I even understand why God went into hiding. Once you understand his mystery, what he really
is, his early involvement in world affairs, and his absence later on becomes obvious. So does
his return and when and why.

No one religion captured the truth. But many got pieces of it. But the real truth makes complete
sense of reality.

“This loyalty to the group even at the expense of one’s intellectual (and maybe even moral) conscience is faith. Faith is this willingness to subordinate to the group where reasons are either insufficient or even non-existent.”

What you have just described is someone having faith in a ritual or set of rituals. What you are saying is that faith is merely loyalty to ritual. While faith can certainly cause loyalty to a ritual, equating the two is a stretch.

Other than that, I have no major problems with what you just said, except for the fact that I think non-secular, traditional religion is under-appreciated (which I understand is not a particularly popular idea right now, but oh well…)

But there are also things which will likely be beyond the ability of our tools to measure, or our minds to understand.

This reminds me of that horrible movie The Happening, where plants start killing people. Early in the movie Mark Whalberg’s character classifies the disappearance of honey bees as “an act of nature we’ll never understand.” Bullshit. There is no fourth law of thermodynamics covering incomprehensibility.

By ritual, I include ritual recognition of symbols. I think that traditions try to perform balancing acts of trying to preserve received wisdom and keep people united both as contemporaries and down through successive generations. I think they rely on ritual practices which psychologically (and, in the case of group physical repetitions, physiologically unite people as functionally one and identifying themselves as one with the group. I think these practices are not in the interest of reason primarily but (a) curbing untested ideas from destroying what has worked, (b) preventing levels of individuality that would destroy group unity, and (c) making sure that practices that worked in the past retain their influence.

Tradition just functions to preserve itself, that’s what it does. It resists all novelty by its nature. And in faith traditions (or to the extent that faith enters into even secular traditions), one of the ways it polices loyalty is by demanding group members be theoretically willing to trust tradition itself either against their reason or when there are an absence of reasons. This loyalty to the group even at the expense of one’s intellectual (and maybe even moral) conscience is faith. Faith is this willingness to subordinate to the group where reasons are either insufficient or even non-existent.

So, I think that humans, as evolutionarily conditioned to trust authorities for obvious practical reasons, have their trust and conformism excessively exploited by traditions, which make them viscerally feel obliged to still accept some modicum of faith. Faithless people strike even the nominal, go-with-the-flow believers and many de facto atheists as suspicious and anti-social. And I think it’s because of this sense of ultimate willingness to defer to tradition is missing and being conformist animals, even those who really don’t believe the propositions of faith traditions very much, still mistrust those willing to abandon all faith since it (irrationally) is taken as a signal of possible willingness to break faith with the group in other ways.

So, in all of this, what I’m saying is that for most people, being faithless is too hard an option. So the option is to take one’s modern, anti-supernaturalistic temperament that rubs against the received symbols and just say that one’s thoughts are what those symbols really mean. This is their way of feeling emotionally faithful while not suffering from permanent cognitive dissonance. Their faith beliefs “really” refer to things compatible with modern or philosophical sensibility.

My hopeful interpretation of this is that if we cannot eradicate religion, we can at least make its interpretation so modern that its backward, irrational, indefensible traditional aspects which no longer have rational support (but rather have positive countervailing reason against them) will diminish in power. The goal would be to so secularize religions’ interpretations of their symbols so that they no longer conflict at any points with Enlightenment values or scientific outlooks or rational habits of thinking. Insofar as they will remain faith traditions, the dimension of irrationalistic loyalty and unjustified belief seem likely to remain active, influential factors within them by their very nature as faith traditions. But nonetheless, if most of their practices and interpretations can be modernized, maybe this will serve as that halfway house to full secularism. Religion only in form, filled completely with secular content suits the Danes just fine and atheists are heralding them as models of secular peace and prosperity that prove that atheism doesn’t lead to anarchy. And that’s because atheists get it—as long as the Danes are only paying lip service to faith out of habit of tradition and symbol and ritual but in their hearts are entirely secularized and not irrationally religious in any anti-rational or immoral way, then they’re across the goal line in most of the most important ways. Sure, a full-blooded total abandonment of religion altogether some day might be a nice utopian ideal. But de facto secularism is good enough for as long as outward religious forms must persist. And given the rate of human progress over centuries, it looks to be quite a bit longer that such outward forms will continue to propagate themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still an advocate of pushing for complete secularism today. But I’m a realist who has hope that at least in some ways, secularization from within religions is a valuable intermediary to that ultimate goal.

So I’m not really saying that tradition alone invents the idea of God, I think it must have some psychological origins prior to tradition. But what tradition does is it prescribes the limits of what that term can mean, gives it its primary symbols and associated rituals, associates some broad values with it, and then let’s people interpret within those boundaries what they mean.

To recap, then, your argument is that the goal of those who “oppose” what you perceive as the religious disconnect from reality should be to gradually drag ritual to a place where it corresponds to something “normal?” (Or perhaps more accurately, that moderates are at least useful in doing this?)

If I haven’t botched that too badly, can you explain exactly how ritualized behavior can approximate “reality” more closely, or at all? Unless we arrive at a consensus of the exact nature of reality, then a ritualized understanding of it is limited in the extreme, since it can only be based on imperfect models but will be held more and more firmly by tradition. In essence, I’m wondering why ritual makes sense as a useful tool under your rubric. I also wonder how it could be incorporated into any theoretical model of society as a positive influence unless one assumes that the prevailing worldview is “right” or “true” in an absolute sense.

Always appreciate your thoughtful comments :)

And for those who just cannot handle the nonsense of a personal God but still want to play along, they can tell themselves God is the mysterious and the personal stuff is true in some weird metaphorical way. And then they can feel good that they don’t have to leave the tradition. They can still believe in “God.”

And for the superstitious who believe in the man with the white beard, they get the full package deal with no need for vaguery. Now THOSE people really worship “God” and not just participate in tradition while calling it “God”.

But, yes, any particular interactions between beings or any puzzle about how they come to be as they are from within the basic laws of the universe and given the basic elements we happen to have in ours are in principle open to a scientific account and require no God to fill such gaps.

And if somehow science could even explain to me how being came to be at all, then I’ll be extraordinarily impressed. But I’m not expecting it. And “God did it” is a non-answer.